How to handle readlink() of "/proc/self/exe" when executable is replaced during execution?

In my C++ application, my application does an

execv()

in a

fork()

ed child process to use the same executable to process some work in a new child process with different arguments that communicates with pipes to the parent process. To get the pathname to self, I execute the following code on the Linux port (I have different code on Macintosh):

Instead of using readlink to discover the path to your own executable, you can directly call open on /proc/self/exe. Since the kernel already has an open fd to processes that are currently executing, this will give you an fd regardless of whether the path has been replaced with a new executable or not.

Next, you can use fexecve instead of execv which accepts an fd parameter instead of a filename parameter for the executable.

int fd = open("/proc/self/exe", O_RDONLY);
fexecve(fd, argv, envp);

Above code omits error handling for brevity.

Email codedump link for How to handle readlink() of &quot;/proc/self/exe&quot; when executable is replaced during execution?